10 years on: What the Gezi protests mean today
Today, at the main entrance of Gezi Park, up the stairs from Taksim Square, an area is fenced off and packed with buses used to transport riot police. Along its perimeter, officers stand guard, semi-automatic weapons in hand.
This police presence has been a fixture of İstanbul's central plaza since mass protests broke out in May 2013, initially to protect Gezi Park from development and later as a broader anti-government movement. Known as the Gezi protests, they prompted a harsh state response that has set the precedent for how even the smallest of demonstrations have been treated ever since.
Most point to May 28, 2013, as the anniversary of the protests, when citizens first clashed with police in the park after several trees were cut down in preparation for the construction of a mall complex sought by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's and his Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Ten years later to the day, Erdoğan was re-elected to his third term as president after three terms as prime minister, likely extending his rule to a quarter century. As journalist Izzy Finkel recently pointed out, Erdoğan valorizes significant dates both in distant and recent history, so it is no coincidence that the run-off elections – and Erdoğan's victory – aligned with the 10th anniversary of the Gezi protests.
The elections and their disappointing results for the opposition overshadowed Gezi's decennial, but for those who were there, every year when late spring rolls into summer, the memories come back.
At the time, I was a graduate student completing an MA in Turkish Studies, and my thesis featured a chapter on the Gezi debacle before protests actually broke out. The development project had been a topic of contestation since it was announced a few months earlier, with environmentalists and activists opposing any efforts that would threaten the park.
The following weeks, I spent long days and nights at Gezi, updating my thesis accordingly so I could include all that transpired before handing it in and preparing for my defense. No one could have imagined it at the time, but a similar anti-government movement would not take shape over the next ten years, and Turkey has been through a lot since then.
Terror attacks in major cities, war in parts of the Kurdish-majority southeast, a failed military coup, still ongoing purges, crackdowns on dissidents, severe limits on free speech, an economic crisis marked by eye-watering inflation and most recently devastating earthquakes that killed at least 50,000 people. None of these developments interrupted Erdoğan’s dominance over Turkish politics and daily life.
The president’s main setback in this period were the opposition victories in major cities, including İstanbul and Ankara, during the 2019 municipal elections, which resulted in a wave of optimism that the government's tenure was waning.
Such hopes proved to be misplaced in the latest elections. At the same time, new mass movements have lacked the oxygen to develop. Yet despite the constraints on government critics – or perhaps because of them – Gezi remains a visceral symbol of the desire for change among large parts of Turkey’s society, and the protest’s annual commemorations serve as reminders that an opposition does exist and it can have impacts if its latent potential is guided appropriately.
For example, Ayfer Karakaya-Stump, associate professor of History at the College of William & Mary, argues the 2019 municipal victories for the Republican People’s Party (CHP) can be linked to the persistent energy generated by the commemorations of the Gezi protests.
“Gezi served as a significant morale boost for the democratic opposition in the country, demonstrating that people who desired a truly democratic, pluralistic, and egalitarian society were not few and far between by any means,” said Karakaya-Stump, who penned an article on how pro-government media tried to disingenuously portray the nature of the protests.
Gezi Park pales in comparison in terms of well-known hangout spots in İstanbul like the more popular and nearby Maçka Park or the Moda Coastal Park on the Anatolian side of the city.
That said, the Gezi Park protests were symbolic in nature: they challenged an increasingly authoritarian government that issued decisions without consulting the public. A government that had been decimating the city's green spaces and forests in pursuit of rapid, lucrative development because the construction sector formed an integral part of the AKP's economic engine.
The protests
Over the 13 years that I’ve lived in İstanbul, I think I've only socialized in Gezi Park once or twice, but every time I walk through it I'm keenly reminded of the importance it carries, namely that it still exists.
Many mark the anniversary of the Gezi Park demonstrations as May 31, 2013, a Friday evening when the protest took on a new dimension. In the early hours of the morning, police tear-gassed protestors camped out in their tents in the park, prompting outrage that led tens of thousands of people out into the streets with the goal of assembling in the park while chanting slogans for the government to resign.
On the main pedestrian İstiklal Avenue, riot police fired endless canisters of tear gas and plastic bullets at sardine-packed crowds as they tried to make their way toward Taksim. A group of half a dozen friends and I made it closer and closer to the front line when several gas canisters hit the ground near us. Immediately, we were engulfed by thick cloud of gas that filled my lungs and left me unable to breathe.
We spotted a building with an open door and crawled up the stairs to the top floor. After being deprived of oxygen for what felt like an eternity and thinking I wasn't going to make it, I was finally able to take a breath and found that my friends were all safe as well.
We spent the next several hours resting at a friend's studio in a backstreet just off İstiklal. Neighbors banged pots and pans outside their windows in solidarity with the demonstrators.
Well after midnight, as protestors again tried to reach Taksim Square and Gezi Park from the Cihangir neighborhood, armored vehicles sprayed pressurized water laced with chemicals that made people collapse to the ground and vomit. I was among those people and I'll never forget the image of demonstrators running in the opposite direction, many stumbling and dropping like flies amid the mayhem.
I felt a pain running from my head to my toes that was unlike anything I had experienced before. My body was shaking, and my friends were worried. The bandana that was covering my face was remarkably insufficient and I had inhaled a heavy dose of God knows what they were spraying. After an hour or so of extreme discomfort, I drank a liter and a half of water, promptly threw up most of it, and my body felt somewhat normal again. By morning, I was surprised to wake up no worse for the wear.
The next week and a half, protestors blocked off the area surrounding the park with barricades at its various entrances, and it became something of a utopian festival with volunteers distributing food, cleaning up trash, providing medical assistance, and even holding concerts, yoga classes, and a host of other activities.
Taksim Square was buzzing with activity while a throng of leftist groups had entered the vacant Atatürk Cultural Center and covered its facade with various banners and flags. Many people climbed to the building’s roof and gazed over the crowds in the square and park.
Though while things at Gezi Park remained both jubilant and peaceful, skirmishes raged on not far in the distance. On June 5, from the terrace historic Taşkışla building of İstanbul Technical University, I watched surreal scenes of protestors shooting fireworks at armored vehicles, which returned the favor with bursts of pressurized water and tear gas. In the neighboring quarter of Gümüşsuyu, more rounds of tear gas and sound bombs were fired, and the gas clouds wafted their way up into the park.
The response
Allowing Gezi to remain occupied was most certainly a tactical move by security forces to let things cool down before they ultimately stormed back in and forced demonstrators out. For the rest of the summer, street protests continued in waves throughout country and were consistently met with police brutality.
Erdoğan was quick to call the protestors “looters” and spread the falsehood that they drank alcohol inside İstanbul's Dolmabahçe Mosque, which was refuted by mosque's muezzin. Though he paid the price for that when he was transferred to another mosque outside the city.
Notably, that year the annual Pride Parade went off without a hinge, but the march was then banned in the ensuing years.
Since Gezi, it has become routine for police to cordon off large sections of central İstanbul to prevent May 1st International Workers' Day protestors from assembling in Taksim Square as well as the March 8th International Women's Demonstrations, though the latter still occur every year in some capacity with large participation, owing to the fact that the women's movement is one of the most resilient opposition forces in the country.
Noting these reactions, Karakaya-Stump said the government apparently remains deeply apprehensive about pluralistic mass demonstrations.
“They are employing various measures to prevent the reoccurrence of another movement similar to Gezi,” Karakaya-Stump told Turkey recap. “These tactics include maintaining oppressive police state policies, manipulating court decisions, supporting the pro-government military contractor company SADAT, and establishing an alliance in Kurdish regions with the Islamist Hüda-Par, a party known to have links to [Turkish] Hizbullah.”
She continued, “These actions, among other things, aim to instill fear in people regarding potential police or mob violence and discourage them from engaging in street protests, even though peaceful protest is still a constitutional right in Turkey.”
Sure enough, on the first anniversary of the protests in 2014, an extensive area of central İstanbul was essentially shut down, and the area was packed with hundreds if not thousands of police that extended from the Beyoğlu district, where the park is located, into the neighboring district of Şişli, where I was living at the time.
I remember the eerie feeling of wandering the mostly empty streets, where the number of police on patrol seemed to outnumber civilians.
The symbol
Gezi has remained on the agenda ever since, with prominent civil society leaders receiving 18-year prison sentences for allegedly assisting an attempt to topple the government, charges built on ludicrous indictments.
Among them are Mücella Yapıcı, an architect and activist, Çiğdem Mater, an award-winning filmmaker, and Osman Kavala, a philanthropist that was handed an aggravated life sentence as the supposed mastermind of the Gezi 'coup'. Lawyer Can Atalay was also among those convicted, though he was recently elected to parliament for the Workers' Party of Turkey (TİP). As such, Atalay is legally entitled to be released from prison, though the courts have so far refused to set him free.
Following the May 2023 elections, in which Erdoğan and his ruling parliamentary coalition retained power, the symbolic meaning of Gezi continues to resonate.
On May 31, one of the few remaining opposition newspapers in Turkey, Birgün published a front-page headline reading: “Don't give up hope, remember Gezi.” The same day, members of the Turkish Communist Party (TKP) assembled on İstiklal Avenue for the occasion, only to be swiftly met by police who took at least 35 participants into custody.
“Both opposition parties and the general population have been hesitant to engage in street demonstrations, despite the higher levels of oppression and corruption in Turkey today,” Karakaya-Stump said.
“Given these circumstances, I currently see the likelihood of spontaneous mass demonstrations similar to Gezi to be quite low, even in situations where significant projects like Kanal İstanbul severely threaten the environment and overall quality of life in the city,” she added.
All things considered, an optimist would deem the Gezi Park protests a victory, as they ultimately saved the park. Though the government picked several prominent figures to be scapegoats and saddled them with lengthy sentences, developers never went ahead with their initial plans to bulldoze the green space.
Still, it remains to be seen if Gezi Park remains as it is today.
“There is certainly no guarantee that Erdoğan will not once again try to implement his plans to build over Gezi Park,” Karakaya-Stump said. “Also keep in mind that the new Turkish parliament is the most conservative and right-wing in the history of modern Turkey, in large part thanks to the coalition Erdoğan formed with parties even further right than the AKP.”
“Such symbolic gestures,” like razing Gezi Park, Karakaya-Stump explained, “may come very handy to keep this extreme right coalition together especially at times of internal crisis. I am afraid the situation in Turkey will deteriorate further and become even more disheartening before it starts getting better. I hope time proves me wrong.”
Throughout the years, Gezi has remained a source of hope even for those most deeply affected by the police brutality that occurred during the protests.
On June 16, 2013, a 14-year-old teen named Berkin Elvan was going to the market to buy bread in İstanbul's Okmeydanı neighborhood when he was struck in the head with a tear gas canister and ultimately succumbed to his injuries nearly nine months later. The youngster became the most visible symbol of the protests, and his death is also commemorated every year.
“We will stay in this country and continue our struggle until the end. In the future, we will shout out again in the name of democracy and humanity,” Elvan's father Sami told Birgün on May 31. “Therefore, one should not be pessimistic. If I am still hopeful, no one should lose hope.”
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Diego Cupolo, co-founder + editor @diegocupolo
Gonca Tokyol, freelance journalist @goncatokyol
Ingrid Woudwijk, freelance journalist @deingrid
Verda Uyar, freelance journalist @verdauyar
Gökalp Badak, editorial intern @gklpbdk
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